Rendering Billboard Particle Smoke with Blender Cycles

If you have created the billboard style particles in Blender, you know that Cycles cannot render them. Here, CG Artist Jonathan Lampel shows how you can create the billboard style particles for easy smoke effects, and have them render in blender Cycles.

Jonathan shows how to animate the particle’s attributes over their life, and shows how to set up a Cycles smoke material for the particle that will work on transparent image planes.